Monday, April 30, 2012

What's Been Going On

My blogging has grown sparse partially because my thoughts have been occupied by concerns that make for bad reading. I have been undergoing an intense process of self-evaluation and improvement, and as a result, most blog posts I write are as flat and self-satisfied as so many mud turtles. Complex, sophisticated, highly-evolved, and truly beautiful in their own way, they are exquisitely dull to any but the specialist.

So I don't post them.

And while I was going to break that cycle and post this one? This post I've been working on since five this morning? I can't do it. I love you people too much to encourage you to read that kind of sludge.

But part of it was worth saving!

Of course, there were some moments that made it clear that we were still deep in the heart of Oaf country... I have a particular spot in my heart for the nameless doctor who burst into my room to tell me about the patient to whom she had just attended, a pre-op male-to-female HIV-positive transsexual prostitute.


"He's out there -- she's out there -- shit, I don't know, but, you know, no protection, no condoms, no nothing --" and the doctor's beaded cornrows rattled as she drew her hands apart to indicate great size, "-- with these anal warts like, like..." and she drew her hands apart again, with an expression of delighted horror at the indicated magnitude. She shook her head. "Just would not listen. Some people, you know?"


I grinned and shook my head, and said, "What can you do?" But what the fuck was up with that? Was she just overwhelmed in the moment? Had my physician suggested to her that a good anal-wart story might prove efficacious in the treatment of nausea, sort of like putting out a well-fire with dynamite? Is there some kind of Hippocratic loophole that lets you bitch about patients to other patients if the patient on the receiving end is sort of delirious?


Medicine is a mystery.

Listen, if I can figure out anything interesting to say about the recovery process, I will, but right now? It's too much like discussing anal warts.

2 comments:

pongacha said...

http://www.hhs.gov/ocr/privacy/hipaa/understanding/summary/index.html

Sean Craven said...

Aha! There is no way anyone could have identified anyone from the description I was given. Now all I need to understand is motivation...